


gibson tuck

by berenicewolfe



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Earthbending & Earthbenders, F/F, Fluff, Lin!centric, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:01:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29519166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/berenicewolfe/pseuds/berenicewolfe
Summary: Lin learned how to braid hair at a young age, and ended up surprisingly proficient at it.This is a collection of stories loosely strung together by Lin and ~braiding hair~Almost a "5 times Lin does her/someone else's hair + 1 time someone does it for her" fic but not quite that.Each chapter will be a different snapshot from a time in Lin’s life, exploring her platonic and romantic relationships with other characters.
Relationships: Lin Beifong & Toph Beifong, Lin Beifong/Kya II
Comments: 8
Kudos: 50





	gibson tuck

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve not written fanfic in 5 whole years, but Lin Beifong and Kya really have consumed me, so buckle in for some fluff, folks! I’ve got a rough plan for about four or five more chapters perhaps, and they are all related to hair, although this chapter is definitely the most tentatively linked—but starting with Toph and Lin felt like a good foundation, so I stand by my choice. I am making the timeline up as I go lmao, bear with me lesbians
> 
> This chapter is set during a beach day out with the Gaang and their kids, and focuses primarily on Lin and Toph’s relationship prior to Suyin’s birth—I just wanted to see some happy childhood memories for Lin tbh. Lots of tiny Lin and tiny Kya being adorable in this one. Enjoy!

Lin learned how to braid hair at a young age. She was an infant with impressively unruly hair; Toph just ran a brush through the dark wires and hoped for the best, and when it grew long enough, she would scrape her daughter’s hair into a bun and leave it at that. Toph always favoured a bun herself, and whilst she knew how to do a few different styles on her own head, courtesy of her mother’s insistence, she had never learned to do them on another person’s hair—funnily enough, not many people had asked the blind girl to do their hair when she was growing up. 

But today Lin’s hair was left down, whipping about her round, cherubic cheeks in the afternoon breeze. They had spent a day at the beach on Air Temple Island with Aang, Katara and the children. Sokka had made a dramatic surprise entrance, cannonballing into the water from the cliff above their chosen cove, which led to all of the children insisting they ought to be allowed a turn jumping from the cliff if Uncle Sokka was allowed. That led to Katara chasing him across the beach with a water whip, shouting about being a responsible role model, which meant no one noticed that Bumi had already made his way up the shortcut to the cliff face Sokka had leapt from. By the time Katara had finished berating her brother Bumi was calling for everyone’s attention from the very edge of the cliff face, making a dramatic show of the great feat of bravery he was about to demonstrate. Naturally, he slipped just as he ludicrously flexed his adolescent biceps for them all, and went tumbling over the edge. Aang sent a gust of air to guide his eldest away from the cliff face’s sharp rocks with a panicked yelp, and gave a wince as he landed right atop Kya in the water. They both came up spluttering, soon squabbling in the shallows, and Lin let out a giggle as Kya splashed a web of seaweed into Bumi’s face.

“Concentrate, Lin,” Toph said firmly, but then she reminded herself this wasn’t proper training. This was a day at the beach. “If you actually want to make that pile of sand look like a starfish, you need to focus,” she finished more fondly.

“It’s all so wobbly!” she grumbled, pushing a pudgy hand into the white sand in frustration, the five-pointed blob in front of her scattering with her bending.

“I know. Even I don’t find sandbending easy.”

“You made an Appa, Mom! You made an _Uncle Aang_ to sit on the Appa!” Lin cried, gesturing to the grand and detailed sand statues beside them.

“I’ve had a lot of practice.”

“I bet she could do it blindfolded!” Sokka chimed in, dodging a smack on the back of the head as he ducked around Toph, still being chased by a seething Katara now that one of her children had nearly killed himself copying his uncle. 

“I bet I could do it blindfolded too!” Lin said, puffing out her chest and tummy confidently.

“You can try,” Toph smirked, electing to stay silent on the fact that Lin couldn’t actually do it with her eyes yet.

Toph had been nurturing Lin’s earthbending since she could crawl—she had learned as a small child herself, and she didn’t see why Lin shouldn’t too, especially since her bending made itself known before she could even talk. (She sent a clay bowl of mashed carrots flying at Katara’s head when she was 11 months old. “I told you she doesn’t like carrots,” Toph deadpanned.) The thing was, Toph’s understanding of earthbending came entirely from the badgermoles and her relationship with the earth itself, which meant that Lin had already spent a fair amount of time with a blindfold covering her eyes as her mother bent earth obstacles around her. It was the foundation of her own learning, and so it made sense for it to become Lin’s too.

It was unconventional, and she’d had many arguments with Katara about her chosen methods, but Katara conceded defeat when she observed Lin blindfolding herself while alone in a room at Air Temple Island, attempting to make her way around the less familiar landscape. She watched Lin’s tiny form, and saw her screwing her little face up in concentration as she stomped a small foot against the ground, fists pulled into her sides and her legs tucked low in an impressively grounded horse stance for a toddler, trying as hard as she could to read her surroundings with her feet. She went through a phase for a whole fortnight of trying to move everywhere she went with her eyes shut at all times, rising after every bump and stumble with a determined huff. That especially made Toph proud. After many stubbed toes and bruised shins, and only one instance of tears, she was able to confidently totter around most spaces, including her mother’s obstacle courses (Toph felt that was a generous term), with her eyes closed. 

Lin closed her eyes now and furrowed her brow in concentration, taking a deep breath before attempting to send out vibrations with a firm kick to the ground. She opened her eyes with a startled look to her mother.

“I can’t see! It’s all fuzzy. It looks how it feels with my hands, it’s all wobbly!”

“The particles of sand are loose, they shift under you all the time. Instead of the particles of earth being close together, like with stone—you know how we talked about density in earth? How it changes our relationship to the ground and our—”

“Mom, you can’t see,” Lin gasped.

“Well tell me something I don’t already know, kid,” she scoffed, leaning back onto her elbows.

“No, Mom, I mean you _really_ can’t see. It’s all fuzzy. Isn’t it fuzzy to you?”

“Yeah, it is. I can bend the sand okay,” Toph said, turning towards her Appa statue and holding out her hand, flexing all of her fingers precisely so that sand Appa began adorning a humongous moustache. She then gave a smaller movement of her fingers and smiled at Lin’s snort as she gave sand Aang a matching one. “But I still struggle to see on the sand. You can practice and hone it a bit, like how I can see you well enough because you’re close. But everyone else isn’t so clear—don’t tell them, but Aunt Katara and Uncle Sokka look the exact same to me from over here.”

Lin giggled, but then frowned. “I’d have thought you wouldn’t like it.”

“The sand?”

“No, the beach.”

“Well, you like the beach, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Lin said, burrowing her toes into the damp sand, “I like it. It’s fun.”

“Good. That’s why we come to the beach,” Toph said simply, before leaning closer to Lin. “Now, come on, I want to see a starfish—focus on each of those tiny pieces of earth. When you draw them together, don’t pull too hard. You want them to rest against each other gently, you don’t want to pull them all tight, or it’ll fall apart. Imagine the water is the glue that holds the pieces together.” They could work on dry sand when she was older.

Lin pushed her lips together tightly and made a fist, then pulled her hand towards her chest. The sand rose in a crisper star formation than last time, but quickly folded in on itself. She huffed.

“Again. Gently.”

Lin took a deep breath. Her little shoulders rose and fell as she concentrated on the pile of wet sand before her. Her face relaxed a little, but her gaze remained focused. She held her hand out and made a small fluid motion, pulling it towards her chest again but slower. The rough shape of a fish surfaced from the ground.

“Hmm. I haven’t ever seen a starfish that looks like that,” Toph said, her fingers buried in the sand to assess her daughter’s work.

“I thought she might like a fish more,” Lin hummed, inspecting her creation, pressing her nose up close to the head of her fish. 

“Who?”

“Kya. She’s more like a fish-fish than a starfish,” she said, looking at the sand from all sides before finishing her inspection, finally standing to throw her hands in the air and despairingly cry, “she’d be a better fish than this though, this one is boring!”

“What type of fish would she be?”

“Hmm. She’d have glittery scales, just like her hair when it’s sunny. And zig zaggy patterns, I bet!”

Toph grunted in acknowledgement and twisted her wrist and flicked a finger at the fish. Lin clapped her hands together and laughed in delight as Toph made the makeshift scales ripple in the sand. “Just like that!”

“Good. You wanna show her?”

“Yeah,” she grinned. “Thank you, Mom.”

“You’re good, kid.”

“I mean thank you for coming to the beach for me.”

“Oh,” Toph said, surprised.

“I really like it. I like doing sandbending with you as well.”

“Yeah, me too,” Toph smiled. She turned as she felt one of the kids approaching, and she could tell it was Tenzin simply because none of the others were as small as him. “Hey, Twinkle Toes Jr.”

“Hey, Aunt Toph. Hey, Lin,” Tenzin mumbled shyly, his hands behind his back.

Lin looked at him plainly. “Hi Tenzin.”

“That—that’s a pretty fish. Did you make it?”

“It’s for Kya,” she said frankly, and Toph stifled a scoff at her child’s bluntness.

She promptly ran off towards the sea calling Kya’s name, followed by a much more reserved Tenzin, wading in with big splashes, far less co-ordinated when out of her element. She kicked and splashed her way towards Kya, who quickly caught sight of the confident yet floundering Lin, and swam her way over so Lin could stand atop her thighs. Toph didn’t worry that her 5-year-old was out of her limited sight and wading into the water with a poorly executed polar bear-doggy paddle, because she knew the others would keep Lin in their sights.

“Come see, come see!” Lin insisted, pulling Kya by the hand the moment the water was shallow enough for her to stand again.

“Okay, Lin, I’m coming,” Kya assured, a patient smile on her face, allowing herself to be towed back up the beach. The 9-year-old was always sweet with Lin. She’d been overjoyed when Lin was born, joyfully babbling that it was like she finally had the sister she’d been waiting for. Lin was enamoured with the older girl from the day she met her, following her everywhere she could from the moment she was mobile, wanting to be like her in every way. Kya humoured all of it with great kindness.

“It’s for you,” Lin said, coy all of a sudden as she presented the fish to her friend, fiddling with her wild dark hair that was now plastered to her cheeks with salt water.

“For me? Oh that’s so kind, Lin, I love it! What a beautiful fish,” Kya exclaimed, and Lin blushed. “Thank you!”

“It’s okay,” Lin mumbled, looking up at Kya from where she was digging a hole in the sand with her toes again. “Mom helped.”

“It’s amazing, I can’t believe you did it with sand! Dad is rubbish at bending sand.”

“It’s all about the party cools and the dance city,” Lin said proudly, puffing her chest out. Toph didn’t have the heart to correct her; she understood the principles, and that felt plenty enough for the 5-year-old for now. “I can teach you about it. It means how close the bits of earth are to each other. You use the water too, like glue!”

“You use the water? Like waterbending?”

“Sort of—” Lin explained, wandering back to the sea with Kya who gave Lin her ardent attention as she told her all about sandbending, particles and earth density, and that yes, maybe this did mean she could waterbend too.

The children (and Sokka) were so content playing together for the day that they didn’t pack up their things until the sun had nearly set. Tenzin and Lin were both so exhausted that they were carried back by Aang and Toph respectively. Katara insisted they stay the night, and that it wasn’t worth keeping Lin up to make the journey back to Republic City. Toph looked down at Lin who previously had her face buried in Toph’s neck, but was quickly roused at the mention of staying the night, and nodded eagerly as she stifled a yawn. Toph let out a sigh, then nodded to Katara.

“I miss being little enough to get carried everywhere,” Kya sighed as they began the climb up the steep slope, eyeing Aang carrying Tenzin as they spoke quietly to each other.

“I can carry you!” Bumi exclaimed, leaping in front of his sister. “Come on, hop on.”

Kya giggled, then jumped up onto his back. Bumi adjusted himself, then stood comfortably.

“Hey Uncle Sokka, wanna play a game?”

“What are we playing?”

“Whoever carries their sister back to the house last is slower than a sloth-roach!” he cried with a maniacal laugh, immediately hurrying up the hill with a howling Kya on his back.

“Wait a minute, hang on—!” Sokka yelled. “Katara—Katara, get on my back, now—”

“Sokka, no—” 

“Just do it!” he cried.

“Sokka, I’m not—” she began, before letting out a disgruntled screech as he grabbed her and hauled her over his shoulder, breaking out into the fastest sprint he could muster. Toph thought he might actually catch up to them despite the head start if he managed to maintain that speed. She looked sideways at Aang who walked several feet away, talking quietly to a sleepy Tenzin. She looked down at her own daughter, who had her legs and arms wrapped tightly about her mother.

“I wish my hair looked like Kya’s hair,” Lin mumbled against her neck with a content sigh.

“What do you mean?”

“It looks so pretty, with all the wavey bits and the loopies. It’s like magic. It’s like sandbending. I don’t know how she makes it look like that.”

Toph frowned for a minute. She didn’t have a hope in hell of emulating whatever Katara did with Kya’s hair—she couldn’t see it to even try. She could do a few different braids, though, and maybe that was somewhere to start.

“I don’t know how to do the loopies, but I can do a braid. I can only do it on myself though. Tomorrow we can practice if you want. You can watch me do mine, and then you can try yours.”

“That would be nice,” Lin murmured, nestling herself more comfortably against Toph. “I like learning things with you.”

Toph squeezed her daughter a little tighter as they moved further up the hill. “Yeah. Me too, badgermole.”

**Author's Note:**

> I know this chapter is barely about hair lmao but hang on in there, I have a plan, I swear. It was meant to be way more focused but I got side-tracked by the family day out, sorry, I don’t know how to streamline. It was fun to try and write for so many characters I haven’t written for before—I hope their voices felt right!
> 
> Feedback is always appreciated, I’m definitely rusty. Positive, negative, hit me with your thoughts.
> 
> My chronically ill ass will try to update as soon as I can. And for those here solely for Kyalin, the later chapters are for you! Come and find me on Twitter if you want to scream about any of these characters @marisacoultr
> 
> Lots of love, stay safe <3


End file.
